I should fear to repeat myself were I to bring forward any formal proof of the fact that capital does have a share in the productive net return. I shall content myself with mentioning one or two cases which show, in eminently clear fashion, the necessity for attributing net return to it.(2*)Wherever labour is crowded out by capital, as, e.g., where a machine takes over the work hitherto accomplished by human labour -- a thing which will happen no less frequently in the communistic state than it does now, -- the capital, or machine, must be credited with at least the same return as that formerly imputed to labour. But this was a net return: therefore, the capital or machine must also be credited with a net return. Were the machine capable of reproducing only its own substance as that is worn away in course of use, it would be less effective than human labour, and would not have had power to displace it. But why should a machine such as this be favoured in the imputation more than any other form of capital? What experience would speak for this?
In accordance with the universal law of differential imputation, every form of concrete capital of better quality has a higher return imputed to it than the concrete capital of lower quality, and this return is measured by the amount of increase in productive results which the employment of the better qualities brings. And as, when we look at production and its results as a whole, it is only net returns that are taken into consideration, it is thereby proved that, in comparing qualities of capital, the standard of imputation must be taken from the net return.
Whoever employs his capital according to the measure in which he sees it influence the productive net return, employs it well;whoever does otherwise, employs it badly. On this point universal opinion is united now, as it will be in the communistic state.
The universal opinion to which we refer is not, however, the untrained judgment of the public in matters of theory, but the ripe expression of experience.(3*)NOTES:
1. In what follows I understand by the term capital the perishable or (with the extended meaning explained in the text)the movable means of production. This conception is adapted to the conditions of a communistic state, in which the national income is obtained solely through production. To take note of those forms of capital which serve in the formation of income outside of production, seemed to me out of place, these being too closely connected with the specific conditions of the existing economic order of things. For the same reason I also refrain from taking into consideration those constituent parts of an undertaker's capital which do not belong to the technical means of production. I have, however, appended, in Book IV. chap. viii, a discussion of the interest on consumption loans and house rent, and, at the end of Book V. chap. xi, I have looked at the intent which comes from the undertaker's wage fund.
To avoid misunderstanding, I wish once more to emphasise the fact that, among the technical means of production, I do not include the means of subsistence which must be held ready at hand for the labourers. These are conditions of production, but not its causes. The cause is here the labourer alone. And this is no contradiction to our previous statement in Book III. chap. iii.
